Mark Clancy’s Bloggy Departure Lounge

I have just read “7 things you should know about collaborative learning”
One thing that I’d like to be able to do, and something that they didn’t specifically mention would be to start a mind map on a topic and have anyone at all be able to add to it.. or perhaps to be able to add a mind map as a comment on a blog… I don’t know (yet!) how to do that with ‘bubbl.us‘…

And I agree with Nico’s blog, about how it’s hard to see enough of the mind map on small screens… but that situation should improve as everyone gets bigger and bigger screens..

But here’s mine and Nico’s mindmap anyway, the one that was featured in the lecture (if you remember after watching our video….(see link earlier..))

CLICK INSIDE THE BOX to drag the map around and see the whole mind map…

Having read the article “the six Cs of motivation” I thought how apt I should add one more ‘C”, and hence make it more ‘memorable’ as the seven seas!! ha ha I’m very funny? Yes?

But seriously… what do you think my extra C would be?

Have a think and a guess first and then scroll down for the answer…
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My extra C is “come up with your own”, which means that there are other things that we can surely think of that effect motivation.. or in otherwords: “circumstance”, which means that there may be other factors that effect motivation that only a classes teacher will know, and know all the better for having a good rapport with their students. Especially for those times that the students don’t really know what they want, and need to be led abit more.

But then, i could have as easily said: “care”, as it can be very motivating for a student if they feel cared for, if someone cares about them. Infact, might this be the biggest omission of the Wang and Han article?

After seeing Chris Betcher’s blog and all the comments that it elicited (27), I also saw another blog the now quite famous: “Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher?” (Voted the most influential edublog posting from 2007) at The Fischbowl blog. It had a whopping 56 comments!

Both of these blogs seemed to encourage discussion by making a statement that is bold, controversial, challenging, and I think a bit extreme, in the way a good hypothetical discussion topic should be.

If you don’t make a controversial, somewhat extreme statement, people will never really begin to analyse their concepts/beliefs and no real discussion will begin! What do you think?

Photo below made available under Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Licence:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stollerdos/223937206/sizes/m/

How good is blogging? I was reading Chris Betcher’s blog on education’s role vis a vis students being able to regurgitate data versus them knowing where to access it and how to use it.

Interesting theme. I was going to put in my two cents worth when I saw that there had already been 27 people before me!! So I got to read all about those other views, contribute to them, and keenly await any feedback on my comments (as well as developing professionally as a bonus!)..

We are all part of a community and it is a good thing to also feel part of it. Get involved!!

“Pleasantly frustrating” was a term used by James Paul Gee, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA in his article about ‘good’ video games as learning machines. (Gee 2005).
Gee’s main point, apart from the soaring possibilities of tapping into the motivating educational force that good video games can be, is that the acceptance of the idea of using video games in schools is held back by perceptions that learning should be ‘hard work’ while video games were too ‘easy and fun’.

I am reminded of teaching English in Indonesia, where older adult students often considered the less structured, more fun games that we played to be of no educational importance.

So we were held back from using these, to some degree, so that these students didn’t feel they were wasting their time and money.

But in high schools, the students have no problems at all with us making their lives more interesting, it is rather the (mis) conceptions of the ‘old-school’ that need to be challenged if schools are ever to become as engaging, absorbing, riveting, compelling as a video game can be, if only for a little while each day..

I have just tried one of the pre-made, online POE activity which I thought was brilliant! It was on the UTS Predict-Observe-Explain (POE) Science e Tasks website. It was so well structured, offering the students all the right prompts at all the right times, which is something it is hard to do as a teacher, because different groups of students will move at different paces. It is superior to an old fashioned paper worksheet with the same prompts because it has an element of suspense (students cannot look ahead), it is unmodifiable after you have made your prediction: you cannot go back and ‘retro fit’ it to the observation; it is colourful and digital and was imbedded with an actual video (from a moon expedition), which is more engaging for students in and of itself (to a degree).

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Having read the blog of Natalie Frisch “Balancing on a piece of string” I was reminded of Matthew encouraging us to be ‘risk takers’in the learning guide, indeed he makes mention of how good teachers encourage their students to take risks when working with digital technology (Kearney & Schuck 2006).

We immersed ourselves in the the world of digital video… Are we funny? Are we not? Are we stimulating? Are we what!! But…… You be the judges!

“….But I wanna know about chemical reactions during the Iraq invasion by the US!”

- hypothetical year 8 student question during a constructionist project based learning assignment.

Where we teach by helping students to ‘actively construct their own learning’, an eminently constructivist (with a ‘v’) activity, we will inevitably come up against the limits of how far we are willing to let the students take the material and set it in a context that they are interested in.

A design and project based learning assignment like the one in the above quote is a constructionist (with an ‘n’) teaching approach and is the extension of constructivism (with a ‘v’) ( see the wikipedia article of Han and Bhattacharya 2008).

Like in Romeo’s fictitious Plainville High, where students were all drawn in different directions on the topic of Australian discovery and exploration, we must expect that students will want to personalise the contexts in which they design and present their constructions/projects.

How to do this in Science and Maths?

Simple: be more flexible, including allowing students to present assignments that have elements of other disciplines in them also. So if it sustains students’ interest, teachers should accept elements of art, history, music, geography, TAS, drama…etc.. For example, students are likely to personalise a powerpoint presentation about a brain dissection with music and other images of their choice.

Obviously we need to keep the focus on our KLA as much as possible, but with students with low motivation such flexibility is really just a scaffold for their motivation which different students need to different levels. The main thing, like Romeo said, is to arouse and sustain their curiosities!

The speed and quality with which ICTs can satisfy curiosity and re stimulate it is where they are our aid in constructivist (with a ‘v’) teaching, and giving students sustained, structured projects to control which incorporate all the other elements of good pedagogy, is where constructionism (with an ‘n’) is our friend.

Reading Basil’s response to Madhu’s podcast my heart went out to them both.
But the current drain on our time that dig. tech. can make is no reason at all for discounting it’s long term benefit potential. Original comments…